Non-violent grass roots reform and Democracy: Scapegoating human trafficker to protect corporations?

Update 10/17/2017: According to Human smuggler found at Tx. Walmart with 39 illegal immigrants in trailer pleads guilty, faces life in prison 10/16/2017 this case appears to be mostly if not entirely resolved, even though it should be clear that this smuggling ring must be much bigger. The only other suspect this article mentions is another undocumented worker they claim is involved, which presumably is right; however they've done nothing to figure out where the labor is going even though there is evidence that contractors indirectly working for major corporations are almost certainly benefiting from it, as the original article below clearly indicates!

James Mathew Bradley Jr. has dropped out of the news cycle, for now but apparently they might be seeking the death penalty against him for his part in the human smuggling operation that killed at least ten or eleven people last July in San Antonio Texas. There doesn't seem to much if any attempt to report on other people organizing this smuggling operation or explaining where these immigrants would be working once they got into the United States.

But it should be obvious that there is much more to this story than the media has reported, and that if they wanted to they could report much more on it and, assuming that he's part of a bigger smuggling effort they might offer him a good deal if he testifies against those that are organizing it, as most reports about organized crime indicate the government operates. However that would be assuming they want to catch the people at the top of the smuggling ring, which might not be their intention at all.

There are occasional stories that say this isn't an isolated incident, including the following article, although they don't go into full details and are quickly forgotten one these stories fade from the headlines:

'Horrific' human-smuggling case in Texas not an isolated event, officials say 07/23/2017

Eight people were found dead and about 30 others injured inside a brutally hot semitrailer parked in a Wal-Mart parking lot in San Antonio, Texas, in what authorities are calling "a horrific scene."

One of the injured later died, officials said, bringing the death toll to nine in what police described as an apparent human smuggling attempt. Officials had first said two additional people had died but later corrected the number to one.

Authorities became aware of the truck overnight after a Wal-Mart employee, who was approached by someone who had been in the truck asking for water, notified police of the interaction, San Antonio Police Chief William McManus said this morning at a press conference, alongside other officials from the city. .....

Meanwhile, surveillance video from the store showed that a number of vehicles entered the parking lot and "picked up lots of folks that were in that trailer that survived the trip," McManus said.

Some of the people who had been in the truck ran into the woods nearby, he said. The area was searched, and another attempt will be made in the morning, officials said. Complete article

The fact that they had cars coming to pick people up so quickly implies that they probably had some people in the area to minimize the damage. Also there is little or no reporting about asking the truck driver if he would cooperate in any efforts to find other people involved in this smuggling ring.

There's an enormous amount of talk about the "rule of law" and how this is allegedly what justifies our immigration system that enables this. If you listen to the talk on the mainstream media many of the loudest voices claim that it are the immigrants that are threatening the "rule of law" by coming here "illegally," even though it doesn't take much research to determine that it is extremely difficult for many of these immigrants to survive in other countries that often have oppressive governments, some supported by our own government. They're rarely involved in the decision making process, and even if they could be they often don't have access to an educational system or reliable news to enable them to participate in the democratic system.

Perhaps we should consider what the purpose of the "rule of law" that these loud pundits are talking about all the time that they claim justifies their oppressive immigration policies.

Are our immigration laws designed to minimize crime prevent civil rights violations and defend democracy?

Or are they designed to give those with political connections access to cheap labor so they can profit by violating peoples civil rights, using divide and rule tactics to drive down wages?

No doubt that if these questions were asked by the mainstream media they would clearly say that the first option is what the laws are designed to do since it clearly sounds much better; however any rational human rights advocate familiar with immigration laws much know that even though the second option isn't the literal truth it is far closer than anyone would want to admit! This is why they don't even ask some of the most basic questions in the mainstream media.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the people that control the media, large corporations, the two leading political parties are all much wealthier than the majority of the public, especially the immigrants they're constantly demonizing. It also doesn't take a genius to realize that the reason why they're so much wealthier is that one class of people does the vast majority of menial work for very little pay enabling the smaller class of people that control large institutions to make enormous profits. They decide which candidates we get to hear from and which ones we don't and we never get to hear from those that try to do a good job on this issue or any other one, if it interferes with their profits.

It also doesn't take a lot of research to find out that when members of the ruling class take advantage of our immigration system they're rarely ever held accountable, or if they do get exposed they face a slap on the wrist at most.

One of the most fundamental basics of the economic system our ruling class worships is, of course "supply and demand." If they investigate this and follow it to the top who will they find provides the demand?

We have an enormous amount of information, although it is scattered in low profile areas to answer that, at least partially, it is the ruling class and many of the people that control our government including Donald Trump and several members of his cabinet ass well as at least one nominee that was forced to withdraw after he was exposed in one scandal to many, although it wasn't the one about illegal immigrants that forced Andrew Puzder to withdraw.

Donald Trump has been involved in numerous scandals where he was caught hiring undocumented workers, and at times tried to manipulate the immigration laws so that he could get away with it legally. This includes an old report where he hired Polish Contractors to demolish a construction site preparing it for a new building and a more recent one, while he was president where Mar A Lago made a lame attempt to hire American workers while simultaneously asking for permission to hire 70 temporary workers from overseas. This ad was hidden in a location where few would see it and the reason clearly appears to be to get his waiver for foriegn workers he must first claim that he attempted to hire local workers and failed.

Andrew Puzder, his first choice for head of the Labor Department was one of at least seven Cabinet nominees including, Zoe Baird, Kimba Wood, Linda Chavez, Bernard Kerik, Tim Geithner, and Wilbur Ross, that were exposed for hiring undocumented workers. Both Tim Geithner and Wilbur Ross were approved anyway. Meg Whitman former GOP governor nominee of California and head of Hewlett Packard and Lou Dobbs who rants and raves against undocumented workers stealing jobs and many other were also exposed for hiring undocumented immigrants. Donald Trump and most of these other people that get caught often claim that they didn't know about it after the fact although there is often evidence to indicate that either he should have known or almost certainly did know.

They're like the Corleone family they have "a lot of buffers."

Heavily relying on "outside contractors" is one of the most common way of avoiding responsibility for labor violations; and an enormous amount of the people that have been responsible for enforcing these laws have profited by using this method and avoiding accountability; however these are only a small fraction of the workers that are being smuggled in and most of these high profile cases probably got in through different means than the one exposed in Texas.

But the point should be clear when these people with connection get caught at worst they might not get an appointment to a Cabinet but are never prosecuted for providing the demand for all these undocumented immigrants; while the immigrants that work for extremely low wages often are and they often get threatened with deportation to help avoid accountability for those that do profit like the Polish workers working for Trumps contractors and the undocumented worker formerly working for Meg Whitman.

Where are the vast majority of these workers going? It doesn't take much to find that some of them are being used for sex crimes, and the majority of the reporting from the traditional media is probably about that but an enormous amount of them are working for contractors that almost certainly sell their products to many of the largest oligarchies that control almost all of the economy. However they have enough lawyers to advise them to maintain plausible deniability, or at least what they consider plausible, and they can rely on their allies not to enforce laws that the rest of us are accountable to.

According to the following excerpts from the ACLU there are well over fourteen thousand people smuggled into the United States each year, many of them under oppressive work environments:

ACLU: Human Trafficking: Modern Enslavement of Immigrant Women in the United States

Human trafficking is a modern form of slavery. It is an extreme form of labor exploitation where women, men and children are recruited or obtained and then forced to labor against their will through force, fraud or coercion. Trafficking victims are often lured by false promises of decent jobs and better lives. The inequalities women face in status and opportunity worldwide make women particularly vulnerable to trafficking. ....

While some trafficking victims are forced to work in the sex trade, many others are forced to perform other types of labor, such as domestic servitude, factory work or agricultural work. Trafficking victims commonly experience physical and psychological abuse, including beatings, sexual abuse, food and sleep deprivation, threats to themselves and their family members, and isolation from the outside world. .....

The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that at least 12.3 million people are victims of forced labor at any given time, 2.4 million of whom toil in forced labor as a result of trafficking.7 The U.S. Department of State estimates that 14,500 to 17,500 people are trafficked into the United States each year.8 However, these numbers do not include the many individuals trafficked within U.S. borders.

The Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley estimates that at least ten thousand people are working as forced laborers at any one time in the United States.9 .....

Traffickers, usually a recruiter or the actual employer, will compel their victims to accept a job through various forms of deception, coercion or physical force. Traffickers deprive their victims of the ability to consent and use physical force or psychological, legal or economic coercion to trap their victims in forced labor situations from which they cannot freely escape.

In extreme situations, victims may be forced into an employment relationship because they were sold by a family member or physically abducted or kidnapped by traffickers. More commonly, traffickers lure their victims into employment relationships by making false promises about the nature and conditions of their future jobs. For example, a trafficker may promise a woman a job in the U.S. as a nanny earning minimum wage, but when she arrives she is instead forced to work in a sweatshop where her wages are withheld, she is forced to work eighteen hours a day and she is not allowed to leave the premises. .....

Forced labor and trafficking is an endemic problem in those industries that lack government regulation or oversight and where, as a result, employers often fail to comply with U.S. labor laws.

As the “informal economy” grows in the U.S. – that is, remunerative work that is not recognized, regulated or protected by existing laws or regulations – so do the occurrences of forced labor or trafficking. Forced labor and trafficking in the United States are most prevalent in domestic service, agriculture, sweatshop and factory work, restaurant and hotel work and in the sex industry. The majority of trafficking cases in the U.S. have been reported in New York, California, and Florida, states with high concentrations of immigrants.15 Complete article

Trade Secrecy or Proprietary Information laws do far more to make it difficult to sort through all the details of this than they do to help expose and prevent it. If not for these laws many sincere labor rights organization could trace the supply chain of many products and ensure that they're not relying on oppressed workers whether they call it slavery or not. Lawyers and public relations people working for the wealthy routinely spin it so that they can restrict the rights of workers as much as possible without calling it slavery, even though it often accomplished the same thing. If one segment of society makes all the decisions and gets all the benefits while another larger segment does all the work that is slavery or something way to damn close.

Many of the goods that are made by workers that are smuggled into the United States or across other state lines into sweatshops that ship their goods to the United States almost certainly get sold to oligarchies including Walmart, Target and many other legitimate corporations that are often exposed, at least briefly when factories in Bangladesh collapse.

"Each year, more than 100,000 people from countries such as Mexico, Guatemala, the Philippines, and South Africa come to America on what is known as an H-2 visa to perform all kinds of menial labor across a wide spectrum of industries: cleaning rooms at luxury resorts and national parks, picking fruit, cutting lawns and manicuring golf courses, setting up carnival rides, trimming and planting trees, herding sheep, or, in the case of Valdez, Gonzalez, and about 20 other Mexican women in 2011, peeling crawfish at L.T. West Inc." The article, The New American Slavery: Invited To The U.S., Foreign Workers Find A Nightmare 07/21/2015, explains how in some cases Louisiana police have been used to intimidate workers that tried to stand up for their rights and were treated like slaves. a large portion of the farm good or undocumented immigrants that work in these jobs probably aren't always in full compliance with these laws; however they almost always work for contractors so like the Corleone family Donald Trump and other members of the ruling class have a lot of buffers. Apparently a variation of this program, the H-2B visa program is what Donald Trump uses to hire his workers at Mar A Lago.

Donald Trump has recently made several speeches falsely claiming that the Republican Party is the Party of Lincoln, however for all practical purposes they're only the Party of Lincoln in name only. Lincoln said, "that no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other's consent. I say this is the leading principle---the sheet anchor of American republicanism." Peoria Speech, October 16, 1854 quoting the Declaration of Independence, which the founding fathers seem to have quickly forgotten when they enshrined slavery into the constitution, "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," the Declaration goes on to say, "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

All this chatter about how these undocumented immigrants are violating the law routinely ignores the fundamentals of the democratic process. If the wealthy are allowed to pass laws regulating the rights of the working class they should have the consent of the working class; instead they created a charade where the wealthy control all the information given to the working class to make their decisions and only allow them to hear from a small number of candidates that cater overwhelmingly to the rich giving the working class one promise after another during campaigns and breaking almost all of them once in office.

The United States has supported coups in Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador, Honduras and many other countries creating many of these refugees; then instead of protecting their rights they use them for labor under oppressive conditions while the ruling class takes all the money. The ruling class controls all the large institutions that dominate the economic system and use their control of this system to rig everything; and this is just one of the ways they use to force the working class to drive down their own wages through "competition" even though the oligarchies that control the market don't pass on the benefits of this competition to the consumers. Workers get their rights and wages suppressed while economists, public relations executives, advertisers, union busters, political pundits, campaign workers, and other manipulative trades get paid much more, even though they don't contribute to the quality of merchandise. These higher paid jobs aren't designed to contribute to society, but to deceive the public and scam them.

Lincoln also said "Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." First Annual Message to Congress December 3, 1861 However neither political Party is doing much if anything to defend labor, instead controlling the electoral process by only providing media coverage to ideologues that support an economic system that rewards certain types of fraud as long as it benefits those with political connections.

If the political establishment was concerned about solving the immigration problems they created they wouldn't have created them in the first place! These policies were designed to enable those with political power to maximize their profits at the expense of those without political power. The political establishment is providing nothing but propaganda to defend democracy while rigging everything so that one class of people does the vast majority of the work while another get all the benefits.

When Donald Trump talks about bombing "the shit out of them," whoever he seems to want to bomb, he doesn't worry about the consent of those he's bombing, nor does he worry about the lies most wars are based on; when he hires labor under oppressive conditions he doesn't worry about the consent of the laborers, when he decides that he's going to deport millions of people who've been living here most if not all their lives he doesn't worry about their consent. Instead he's supporting voter suppression laws and many of the political manipulation that he railed about during the campaign, which is standard operating procedure for the so-called "outsiders" that the media occasionally presents as an alternative to the establishment candidates.

The constitution doesn't say that a fraction of one percent shall control the media and decide which candidates get name recognition needed to get elected!

However by consolidating the media into six oligarchies they've enabled a small percentage of the public to control the propaganda used to make decisions to avoid addressing the consent of the governed!

Now thanks to the consolidated control of the political establishment and media they've been able to create a totally disfunctional government that only serves the interests of those controlling it!

At least until enough people wake up and stop accepting the candidates that the mainstream media presents to us!

For the most radical racists and those living comfortably this may seem like a bunch of ranting and raving; however Donald Trump's decision to withdraw protection from "Dreamers" and other immigrants even includes many veterans that were recruited and trained to fight wars based on lies about weapons of mass destruction. Are we going to say to them, "Thanks for going to Iraq and fighting for oil, but now that we don't need you anymore get the hell out?" With all the talk about fighting terrorism there is little or no consideration to the fact that even though some of them may be irrational there may also be some that tried to address concerns peacefully and eventually came to the conclusion that the government wasn't cooperating and went to bizarre extremes. Instead of inciting terrorism by refusing to address legitimate concerns the government should be teaching the public about the root causes of violence including early child abuse, abandoned inner cities, economic inequality and other causes.

Of course it shouldn't just be the veterans that were deceived into fighting wars based on lies that should be entitled to participate in the decision making process; if we want to honestly declare our country to be the "leader of the free world" our politicians need to do their best to provide accurate education and news to everyone and allow as many people as are impacted by the decisions made by the government to participate in the democratic process instead of deporting those we don't agree with and increasing voter suppression activities!